Mobile communication techniques have developed such that subscribers can transmit data of a large capacity with high speed using a mobile communication terminal. Unlike some related art techniques employing voice communication and short message services, multimedia services capable of transmitting multimedia data such as still images, long text messages, audio signals, moving images (video), and animation using a mobile communication terminal or an Internet e-mail service using the mobile communication terminal, are now are being provided to service subscribers.
FIG. 1 is a block diagram illustrating a mobile communication system for a multimedia messaging service (MMS) in accordance with the related art.
As shown in FIG. 1, the mobile communication system for an MMS comprises a plurality of mobile communication terminals 100 and 500 for providing a wireless call service to each subscriber from an end of a mobile communication network, transmitting an MMS message or an e-mail message created by a transmitting side subscriber, or transmitting the MMS message or the e-mail message to a receiving side subscriber. The mobile communication system also comprises a plurality of servers 200 and 400 for connecting the mobile communication terminals 100 and 500 by using a mobile communication network. The servers also provide an MMS or an e-mail service to the subscribers. The mobile communication system further comprises an MMS gateway 300 for performing the MMS or the e-mail service by connecting the servers 200 and 400 to each other.
If the transmitting side subscriber transmits an MMS message or an e-mail message through the mobile communication terminal 100, the server 200 receives the message to perform a certain process. The server 200 then transmits the message to the MMS gateway 300.
The MMS gateway 300 transmits the message of the transmitting side subscriber to the receiving side server 400 that manages the receiving side terminal 500. The receiving side server 400 then transmits the message to the mobile communication terminal 500 of the receiving side subscriber.
FIG. 2 is a flowchart illustrating a method for transmitting a message in a mobile communication terminal in accordance with the related art.
Referring to FIGS. 1 and 2, a multimedia message (or an e-mail message) is composed by the subscriber's instruction (S10). The mobile communication terminal 100 then stores the composed message in a memory region allocated for a message transmission service (S20).
The mobile communication terminal 100 has a memory having a capacity of approximately 8 megabytes, for example. Preferably, approximately 3 megabytes of the memory are allocated as a heap. Herein, a heap may be referred to as a priority queue indicating a memory region allocated to programs and recollected repeatedly. Whereas a stack region is strictly operated by a Last In First Out method, the heap does not have a certain specification regarding a size of a block requested by the programs or a request order (the number of times for request).
The mobile communication terminal 100 judges whether the size of the composed message exceeds a memory capacity at the time of storing the message (S30). If the size of the message exceeds the memory capacity, the mobile communication terminal 100 determines that an error has occurred and stops the message transmission (S50).
If an image of 3 megabytes is encoded for insertion into the message, the size of the message is increased to approximately 4.5 megabytes. However, since the memory size allocated for the message storage is limited to 3 megabytes, the encoding process of the mobile communication terminal 100 for composing a message is not normally performed. Particularly, a phenomenon, wherein a memory capacity is exceeded, frequently occurs in a mobile communication terminal having a camera with mega pixel capacity.
If the size of the message does not exceed the memory capacity at the time of storing the composed message, the mobile communication terminal 100 performs a normal message transmission (S40).
As aforementioned, the related problems result from the fact that the memory capacity allocated to transmit a message by the mobile communication terminal 100 is limited and the phenomenon of the memory capacity being exceeded frequently occurs.
Especially, in the process for transmitting a message in a mobile communication terminal having a camera of several mega pixels, the phenomenon of the memory capacity being exceeded frequently occurs such that the subscriber has to resize a corresponding image each time the phenomenon occurs.